During the day the neighborhood wears black, with a steady stream of businessmen flowing out of the train station at the corner: thousands of respectable career types sporting the same haircuts and the same suits, with lives that are somehow always the same, too. In vast numbers they pour across the chaotic Shibuya Crossing, this most incredible of intersections, where crosswalks crisscross the streets in every possible direction. However, by afternoon the district belongs to the trendsetters, who in turn flaunt all the colors of the rainbow. The fashion-crazy of Japan come here to constantly reinvent themselves in a maelstrom of neon advertisements and video clips projected onto the buildings’ facades, with the latest pop hits blasting from everywhere and nowhere. Ultra-short, ultra-long, flashy or morbid Goth style, sober black or neon green – the trends bubbling to the surface in Shibuya don’t even have names yet. After all, they have only just been invented.
Japan is known as the land of the rising sun; its religion is a unique blend of Buddhism and Shinto, with a god for every occasion. Certainly one of them must be the patron saint of fashion, perhaps a god who is not worshiped in a temple, but in a department store – for example, at Shibuya 109. But can this place really be called a department store? It is a hodgepodge of shops that are constantly being restyled, and have shelves stocked with the latest in everything. With its sales of 10 to 15 billion yen per year, calculated in terms of sales per square meter, Shibuya 109 is the world’s biggest shopping complex under one roof. “Sometimes we stop offering certain items after just a few days to make room for new goods,” explains Yasuko, 23, salesperson at Dolca Rosa, a shop catering to trendy girls. “Things pass through here so quickly, it’s totally chaos. Sometimes I’m here till late at night changing the displays.” Some shops like Chup can have up to 800 new items in their collections every year. The joshikosei, as the fashion-crazed youngsters are called here, have inexhaustible appetites. On average they spend around 50,000 yen – approximately €300 – on each new outfit. Most of that is spent on glittering, unusual, funky accessories.
Being colorful and eye-catching is what matters most in Shibuay, no matter what time of day it is. Photos: PixelioA paradise for trendsetters – and for trend scouts? Nike and Puma have people constantly combing Shibuya for new ideas, and the great Karl Lagerfeld is said to have taken thousands of photographs here before opening his boutique in Tokyo. The upscale brand Louis Vuitton even contracted Takashi Murakami, the Tokyo guru of youth trends, to design an entire line of handbags; Murakami is a contemporary artist whose manga works can be purchased at the Mangrake comic store in Shibuya. Sven Kilian, a trend scout for the international trend monitoring network CScout, is out and about in Shibuya almost every day. He checks out the advertising spots on the giant billboards and screens, listens when the giant trucks drive by blasting the intersection with advertisements for a new CD. It’s a mixture of sounds and lights, a living video clip, a disorienting slice of Tokyo. “The fact is that you are constantly bombarded with advertising here,” says Kilian, who stalks the newest of the new for clients such as BMW and Krombacher. “But that is what makes it so interesting. The person who can stand out in the crowd and manages a breakthrough here can make it anywhere in the world.”
In Shibuya, the latest craze is always an extremely short-lived creature, no matter what it is. Its half life is often only a couple of weeks; that is all the time a product is given here. Two weeks from conceptualization to the store shelf? Impossible in Europe, where three months’ production time for clothing is perfectly normal. Compare this to Japanese boutique owners, who travel to Korea once or twice a month, purchase fabric, take the material plus 30 or 40 designs to the factory, and two days later emerge with their finished samples in hand. Fittings take place a week later, and ta-daa! – a new trend has arrived in Shibuya, ready to wear. During the Fashion Week shows, customers sitting by the runway are already on their mobile phones, ordering the piece they want before the model has even finished strutting off the catwalk. Speaking of which, word of anything new and good spreads like wildfire via mobile phones, which are also something that Tokyo consumers replace every three months on average.
Daring cuts, jarring colors, lengths that are shamelessly short or undulatingly long – on the main drag of Shibuya nothing is embarrassing, unless of course it is already out. The fashion whirlwind doesn’t quiet down until late in the evening, around midnight when the last trains depart. It will be six hours until the sea of black returns, until the business men are back. And then a few hours more until the rainbow kicks in again. A few hours until everything is red, green, yellow and white. Or whatever the hot new color is.